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Customer Experience

Prove ROI
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The Holy Grail of Experience: How Your CX Program Can Prove ROI

By: The InMoment Team

Every brand wants to crack the code to prove a skyrocketing customer experience (CX) return on investment (ROI). But obtaining stellar ROI is not a simple process, especially if businesses can easily become discouraged when it seems as if their CX programs aren’t producing the amazing results they expected. That’s why some consider it the “holy  grail” of customer experience! But proving the value of your CX program shouldn’t be a process that starts only after the work is done; to successfully show the value of your efforts, you need to consider how you plan to prove ROI from the very beginning. 

Additionally, it’s important to first recognize that the factors impacting ROI cannot be understood linearly. Every department within your company has a different perspective on how their area of the business affects ROI. This makes measuring ROI by customer experience not so straightforward. Your business needs a holistic view of your brand, customers, employees, and the market to drive ROI successfully. 

Here are three tips based on our eBook, “Five Steps to an ROI-Focused CX Program,” that will help your company build a CX program that directly increases revenue. Let’s get right into it!

  1. Design with the End in Mind
  2. Understand Your Customer
  3. Tailor Employee Behavior

Tip #1: Design with the End in Mind

Designing an experience for customers means not just meeting the present need, but the future one as well. This means optimizing the customer journey by adapting to what customers want—even if your business had never considered those ideas before. 

Your company needs to be ready to remove from, add to, and revise its CX program overtime. For example, our eBook 2021 Digital Customer Experience Trends Report, discusses how digital has been a trend in America and Canada long before the pandemic. The main point is that digital will stay relevant after the government removes restrictions, so businesses need to prepare for the future of digital customer journeys. 

As you already know, your CX program is a powerful tool. When your brand designs with careful attention to the intelligence informing you of incoming issues in the customer experience, your chances of increasing ROI improve immensely. In fact, one study found that a focus on the buyer’s journey reaps over 50 percent greater return on marketing investments than those that don’t. 

Tip #2: Understand Your Customer

Actionable intelligence stems from all kinds of sources and each type of data can contribute to your company’s overall knowledge of your customers. From CRM, to VoC, to loyalty, financial, transactional, and beyond, don’t underestimate the value of tons and tons of diverse information. 

By taking advantage of various data channels, Hawaiian Airlines was able to gain a deeper insight into their customers’ experiences. “InMoment appends upwards of 300 customer-specific data points to each response. As a result, Hawaiian Airlines understands the impact that seat location, aircraft type, departure time, delays, food, flight crew, stops, travel history, and other variables play in each customer experience. This extremely detailed analysis enables Hawaiian Airlines to understand trends and pinpoint the exact factors most likely to have significant impacts on customer satisfaction.”

The combination of CX, market experience (MX), and employee experience (EX) data gave Hawaiian Airlines the holistic viewpoint it needed to direct its CX Program towards greater business outcomes. And that’s the key! The right data can be a customer experience game changer and lead to better business performance.

Tip #3: Tailor Employee Behavior 

Now that your brand knows its customers, it can train employees to accommodate them according to their specific needs. Employees are often the most crucial contact point with a customer because they act as company representatives. What customer would stay loyal to your brand or purchase anything if they encounter an employee who fails to meet their standards?

This case study shows that there was a growth in NPS when the business conducted behavioral initiatives instead of primarily focusing on operational improvements. The data tells the truth! By involving employees your brand learns not only about the employee experience but the customer experience through their lens. When both business and employees work in tandem your CX program reaches a higher potential to increase ROI.

We just explained three tips to capture more revenue through customer experience, but there’s more! Read this eBook that goes over five essential steps on how to focus your CX Program on ROI.

Unstructured Customer Feedback
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Three Ways Unstructured Customer Feedback Helps You Improve Experiences

By: The InMoment Team

It’s no secret that businesses need unstructured customer feedback to have a successful customer experience (CX) program. Without honest, detailed criticism or praise, it’s hard to assess how well a product or service is doing, but it’s also difficult to understand the “why” and take action to improve. That’s why more and more, customers are seeing open-ended questions in surveys instead of metric-based ones: unstructured feedback can lead to a more authentic insight into the customer experience.

But how should brands harness the power of unstructured feedback in their existing surveys? And how can they take the next step of not only collecting that feedback, but derive actionable intelligence from it so they can improve experiences? Our latest eBook, “Unstructured CustomerFeedback: The Key to Unlocking the True Voice of Customer,” walks you through best practices we’ve learned from our many years of experience. This blog will spell out the major benefits of employing those best practices. Let’s get started!

Three Ways Unstructured Customer Feedback Improves Experiences

  1. Gathers More Genuine and Less Filtered Responses
  2. Collects the Missing Pieces
  3. Follows the Right Patterns

Benefit #1: Gathers More Genuine and Less Filtered Responses

What makes for a “good” survey? Businesses often make the mistake of only asking metric-based questions, which prompt customers to answer very specific questions in very specific ways. This leaves brands only learning what they want to learn and possibly missing other important aspects of the customer experience.

Let’s say a restaurant uses an NPS question to gauge the success of their customer experiences. The brand’s post transaction survey therefore reads, “on a scale of 1-10 how much would you recommend us?” Customers then respond with only a single number and the restaurant is left wondering why customers rate it as low as a 5. As you can see, this metric-based question can only measure the experience, and therefore fails to explain why a customer would or wouldn’t recommend the eatery. 

If the restaurant had followed up the first question with an open-ended “why” question, then its feedback would include the reasoning behind the score, and would help the business understand what it needs to do to improve the CX program. With open-ended questions, brands hear the voice of customer more clearly because customers have more freedom to candidly express themselves, telling your brand what they actually want to tell you, not what you want to hear.

Benefit #2: Collects the Missing Pieces

Open-ended questions mean unpredictable and varied responses, but that’s a good thing! The feedback you receive is so much more detailed, so it can answer questions and address issues your brand wouldn’t have considered in the first place.

One of our clients, a large hotel and entertainment brand, couldn’t figure out why one of its locations was receiving such low scores from guests. This is because it was using a metric that could only see that guests were unsatisfied with their stay, but not exactly why. Through text analytics, the brand was able to analyze its unstructured data and discover that an air filtration problem was allowing smoke from the casino to enter the rooms.

By leaving survey questions open-ended, your brand not only learns the genuine opinion of customers, but also about problems it might have never known about. At the same time, feedback is not always negative; it’s important for your business to know how well it’s executing at certain touchpoints along the customer journey! These game changing pieces of intelligence can help to fill in the blanks so you have a truly holistic view of the customer experience.

Benefit #3: Follows the Right Patterns 

Listening to the true voice of customer gives your business a greater capability to track common problems your customers are having over time. Your brand will then be able to identify and analyze patterns that emerge from responses and address those issues with an actionable plan.

For instance, let’s imagine that customers are having complications with your company’s website. A recent system update has caused a bug that’s disrupting functionability, leading to a seemingly random rise in customer frustration. With unstructured feedback, your brand would be able to recognize a new trend in responses, spot the platform issue, and take action to fix it. 

Unstructured responses make it easier to recognize both positive and negative trends in your CX program, and also helps you to pinpoint new areas to focus on as customer expectations develop over time. 

In the end, failure to employ unstructured feedback means that your CX program will have a hard time realizing its potential. Metrics alone can only measure the past; they can’t help you take action and create better experiences in the future. That’s why the stories you derive from open-ended questions are so vital to your big picture success—and to your bottomline.

 
Unstructured customer feedback can help your business improve customer experiences by unlocking the true Voice of Customer—but how do you best leverage that feedback in your program strategy? Read our latest eBook to read about the best practices recommended by our experts here!

customer journey mapping
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Customer Journey Mapping Explained: What Is It and Why Does it Matter?

By: Helene James, CX Consultant

If you’re in charge of customer experience (CX) at your organisation, you’ll know how important it is to take a walk in your customers’ shoes. But, do you know the true impact of visualising customer interactions? Brands who understand their customers’ journey stand out in the marketplace. InMoment’s global research found that organisations who have developed their customer journey map and understand experiences across these journeys reach the highest level of customer experience maturity. And, mature programs are aligned with outstanding business results. 

Mature businesses experience: 

  • 93% more profitability
  • 92% higher NPS scores
  • 89% greater retention

At InMoment, we believe experiences—the culmination of moments filled with emotions, judgments, learnings, and much, much more—shape the world we live in. And with every moment, there is an opportunity to make a positive impact; to leave a mark. 

What is Customer Journey Mapping?

When you look at the world through your customers’ eyes, you’ve started along a process called “customer journey mapping.” This process involves walking in the shoes of a typical customer as they discover your brand, interact with your products, and services, and decide if they’ll stay or switch to your competitor. Along their journey, there will be multiple opportunities to engage with them and deliver exceptional experiences. It’s time to understand—and own—the moments that matter to your customer.

Why Does Customer Journey Mapping Matter?

Customer journey mapping is a proven way to understand why people do what they do and what emotions drive them. With a customer journey framework, your business can take informed action to solve problems, provide a truly differentiated experience, and drive value for your customers, employees and business. 

How Can I Get My Hands on a Customer Journey Map Template?

Customer Journey Mapping is a flexible consulting engagement for organisations seeking more complete, accurate insights into what their customers really feel, perceive, and experience. It includes resources, expertise, and documentation—including detailed visual representations of the complete customer journey—to identify hidden moments that matter, and close the gap between internal CX perceptions and customer realities. At InMoment, we have in-house consultants who take on the challenge with you. 

Interested in learning more about customer journey mapping? This eBook “Five Steps to Uncovering the Real Customer Experience Journey,” breaks down the strategies you need to build, act on, and evolve your customer journey map. Read it here!

ROI-Focused CX Programs
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4 Success Stories from ROI-Focused CX Programs

By: The InMoment Team

It’s easy to get hung up in the metrics when it comes to customer experience (CX). In fact, terms like Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Effort Score (CES), and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) have become synonymous with traditional CX initiatives. But in this modern era, focusing on the score isn’t enough to move the needle. Today, the initiatives that are most successful are those ROI-focused CX programs that zero in on business outcomes. 

At InMoment, that is exactly the kind of program that we help our clients to design. In fact, in the recent report, The Forrester Wave™: Customer Feedback Management Platforms, Q2 2021, our clients praised us for our “partnership and focus on delivering outcomes…[and] gave InMoment exceptionally high marks for enabling the ability to show the business impact and ROI of CX.” 

This is our mission, to help our clients improve experiences at the intersection of value—where customer, employee, and business needs come together. Ultimately, our clients are able to move the needle and go beyond managing their experience to actually improving it. With the right intelligence, businesses can empower the right people to take transformative, informed action in the most effective ways and drive value across four key areas: acquisition, retention, growth, and cost reduction. In other words, we help our clients build ROI-focused CX programs that yield better results for the business and better experiences for their customers and employees.

In today’s blog, we’ll walk you through four success stories from our clients who are moving the needle for their business with their ROI-focused CX programs. Let’s take a look!

4 Inspirational Stories from ROI-Focused CX Programs

Success Story #1: America’s Largest Cable and Home Internet Provider 

In an attempt to limit customer churn, a telecom giant partnered with InMoment to identify at-risk customers and immediately reach out to understand the issue and retain their business. The company installed InMoment’s customer listening technology within several of its regional customer care centers to enable immediate feedback following each interaction. 

Customers who give negative responses are asked if they would like to speak with a manager regarding their issues. Using real-time alerting, managers are notified of customer callback requests immediately. Three percent of all respondents request a callback, totaling 1,000 customer recovery opportunities each month (12,000 per year)

With the average cost of a triple-play package (phone, cable, Internet) being $160 per month, the average annual value of each customer is $1,920. Using this formula, InMoment presented the company with the opportunity to recover $23 million in annual revenue by implementing a streamlined process for identifying and rescuing dissatisfied customers.

Success Story #2: North American Fast Casual Giant

A fast-casual restaurant brand that has become a household name with it’s unique blend of quick, convenient service and mouth-watering menu items has seen tremendous success with it’s CX initiative. Since partnering with InMoment to get a better understanding of their experience and where they can take effective action to improve it, their OSAT score has increased by 34%. Additionally, the brand saw 4% revenue growth in just one year after implementing their new solution!

Success Story #3: Tesco

Tesco—a mammoth multinational grocery and general merchandise retailer—knows its customers want more than just a mundane, transactional grocery shopping experience. So it works to create a unique shopping experience for its customers by encouraging its 330,000 employees across the UK to give a little bit extra through a programme called, Every Little Helps. With this mantra at the core of the company’s mission, Tesco has grown to become the fifth largest retailer in the world with £48 billion in annual revenue and 7,300 locations in 10 countries.

Success Story #4: TELUS

Leading the telecommunications industry, TELUS is Canada’s fastest growing telecommunications company with more than 13.1 million customer connections. Whether it be personal, business, health, or security oriented, TELUS offers a full scale of innovative telecommunication products and services. To continuously improve their customer experiences, the brand partners with InMoment and focuses on and ROI driven strategy.

In just 18 short months, TELUS saw a $1 million dollar increase in annual savings, a 100% increase in customer feedback volume, best-in-class response rates, and a 1 in 3 recovery for customers that received a follow-up. Furthermore, by focusing their efforts to reach more customers with proactive recovery, they have seen a $5 million-dollar opportunity in churn reduction. TELUS can expect to see further increases in these areas due to their continuous attention to response trends.

The Importance of ROI-Focused CX Programs

According to third-party research firm, Forrester, 79% of VoC and CX measurement programs do not quantify the business impact of issues. This means that the programs who can successfully prove their value to both the business and the customer are leading the pack. 

Want to learn more about how we help our customers build ROI-focused CX programs? Take a look at The Forrester Wave:™ Customer Feedback Management Platforms, Q2 2021 here!

Medical Device
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Creating Customer-Centric Cultures for Medical Device Brands

By: The InMoment Team

The trick that comes with creating customer-centric cultures (and something many brands miss when planning these projects) is that it’s not a one-and-done process. It’s a cyclical, continuous effort that every company, including medical device and supply brands, need to pay constant attention to as they create improved experiences.

If you’re worried that your organization might need to brush up on a more customer-centric culture, don’t be! We’ve been in the business of Experience Improvement (XI) for a long time, and while there’s always more to learn, we’ve put together a few tips that we’ve seen create great customer-centric cultures time and again.

  1. Create Cross-Functional Teams
  2. Leverage Advocacy and Meetings
  3. Tweak Hiring and Messaging

Tip# 1: Create Cross-Functional Teams

One reason a lot of medical device, or other, brands struggle with creating customer-centric cultures is because they try to have teams do so from within siloes. The problem with this approach is that it makes every team work off of their own idea of the customer, which creates highly inconsistent experiences and, ultimately, customer churn.

Fortunately, this problem has a relatively simple fix: let your teams mingle! Creating a cross-functional team is a great way to bring isolated views of the customer together, resulting in a 360-degree view that is both something all teams can work off of and, at the end of the day, more accurate. An accurate and whole picture of the customer works wonders for Experience Improvement!

Tip #2: Leverage Advocacy and Meetings

The next step in this process is to take your synergy beyond customer experience (CX) meetings… and advocate for customers across the organization! Let even the employees who aren’t near the front lines know how their work helps build a better experience. A lot of companies think that employees might not care to know how customers feel if they’re “too” behind-the-scenes; the truth is that no team is unattached from Experience Improvement, and letting them know that boosts morale.

What’s funny about customer-centric culture is that some folks take the term to mean things only getting better for customers. From what we’ve seen, employees who have a chance to become more invested in customers’ experiences end up creating a better employee experience (EX) for themselves, which creates a continuous improvement feedback loop.

Tip #3: Tweak Hiring and Messaging

Once organizations create a unified view of that customer and then spread it to all of their employees, it’s time to extend that passion outward. Brands that infuse this new perspective into their hiring techniques will stand a far better chance of finding employees who are not only genuinely interested in Experience Improvement, but also a great fit for such a customer-centric organization.

Messaging also plays a key role here; you want to let new and prospective customers know that they too can benefit from a meaningfully improved experience that your brand re-dedicates itself too. More fundamentally, this approach lets both new and existing customers know that you value them as people, not just price points, which will keep them coming to you instead of the competition, strengthen mutual relationships, and create a stronger bottom line for your organization.

Interested in learning more about how your medical device brand can create customer-centric culture? Click here to read our full-length eBook on the subject and to gain more intel on meaningfully improving all of your experiences!

Customer Experience Metrics
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Four Goals for Your Program That Go Beyond Customer Experience Metrics

By: The InMoment Team

When it comes to customer experience (CX), a single moment can mean all the difference. And that can be easy to forget when your brand is interacting with countless customers over multiple channels every day. When it comes down to it, however, a moment can mean the difference between a positive or a negative experience—and a boost or a dent in your core customer experience metrics.

For many experience programs, those metrics are the end-all-be-all. Every move they make is with the express purpose of driving those numbers up. At InMoment, we believe that experience leaders should aim higher at goals that go above and beyond typical customer experience metrics. More specifically, we help our clients design programs that target four economic pillars to help them not only improve experiences for customers, boost metrics, and build loyalty, but also to benefit the business where it counts: the bottom line.

Today, we’ll walk you through each of those four pillars and tell the stories of brands who have leveraged their experience programs to achieve those goals. Let’s get to work!

The Four Economic Pillars of CX

  1. Customer Acquisition
  2. Customer Retention
  3. Cross Sell & Upsell
  4. Cost Reduction

Pillar #1: Customer Acquisition

A well-built CX program enables organizations to anticipate what new customers are looking for in a brand—and therefore they’ll be able to leverage that information in their efforts to boost acquisition numbers.

For example, a major athletic company sought to capitalize on acquisitions by optimizing its surveys to find new types of customers. By targeting respondents between the ages of 18 and 35 with specific questions, the company was able understand this demographic and expand to new cities and demographics. 

The practitioners who ran this initiative were able to prove its worth by tracking the new customer acquisition, increases in unique customers, and market share growth that it generated.

Pillar #2: Customer Retention

Organizations should never underestimate the power of service recovery—70 percent of customers who have a situation resolved in their favor will return to a brand, while a 10 percent increase in customer retention can grow a company’s value by 30 percent. Truly customer-centric companies leverage their CX programs to identify disgruntled customers, reach out to close the loop with them, and ultimately prevent customer churn.

For example, America’s largest cable and home internet provider leverages VoC technology in their regional customer care centers. They discovered that 3% of all respondents requested callbacks, totaling 1,000 customer recovery opportunities a month (or a whopping 12,000 per year). By combining this insight with customer lifetime value, the company was able to identify $23 million in recoverable revenue—directly resulting from customer retention!    

Pillar #3: Cross-Selling/ Upselling

Given that it costs 25 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one, brands stand to gain a lot from finding new cross-selling and upselling opportunities.

Organizations can leverage CX listening tools to identify what about a brand spurs trust and loyalty from its customers and then take action to make those offerings even stronger. After all, nearly 50 percent of customers are willing to spend anywhere from 11 to 50 percent more with a brand they feel they can trust. Additionally, predictive analytics can be tuned to identify which customer segments are more open to new offerings. This allows marketing teams to target those customers with campaigns that will encourage them to spend more with the brand.

An example of a brand leveraging their experience program to grow share of wallet comes from a large cafe group that was able to capture feedback from its existing customer base, analyze their sentiments, and make fundamental menu changes accordingly. As a result, the cafe group saw a noticeable revenue bump that it was able to link directly to their program insights and subsequent menu changes.

Pillar #4: Cost Reduction/ Elimination

Finally, organizations can use CX feedback and employee feedback to both save money within operations and to simplify their provided experience. Are there ineffective processes that are costing more than they’re worth? Eliminating such costs can save companies time, resources, and revenue. (After all, training one employee can cost an average of almost $1,100!)

A top-tier mattress retailer used CX tools to install an exit survey for departing employees, giving them a greater understanding of employee sentiment. After implementing the necessary changes to reduce turnover and new hire training costs, the company was able to establish a clear link between its CX strategy and the ROI it helped to generate.

Don’t Stop at Customer Experience Metrics

In the simplest of terms, what we do as CX professionals is create interactions that inspire attitudes in our customers than, in turn, produce desired outcomes. One of your desired outcomes can be to simply improve your CX metrics, but don’t let your goals stop at the numbers! 

Instead, create a strategy for your experience program that aims to benefit the business as a whole by increasing customer acquisition and retention, growing wallet share, and decreasing unnecessary costs. You have the power to help your business thrive, so aim big, go beyond the metrics, and inspire meaningful outcomes!


Want to learn more about how your experience program can produce desired outcomes? Check out this eBook that explains how to use the power of social science and your experience ecosystem to leverage the power of a single moment and meet your goals.

Linkage Analysis
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Three Ways to Create a Successful Linkage Analysis Strategy

By: The InMoment Team

Linkage analysis is a key part of any customer experience (CX) program. It’s a process that allows companies to dig deep into the experiences they provide to ask the big CX questions: what could the business do better, what are customers seeing, what is impacting finances, and how to create and sustain true Experience Improvement (XI).

Today, we’re going to run through three elements we’ve seen companies use to create amazing linkage analysis strategies, enabling practitioners like you to meaningfully improve customers’ experiences, create a strong bottom line, and point back to all of this when going back for more funding!

Three Elements of Successful Linkage Analysis Strategies

  1. Business Insights
  2. Customer-Specific Details
  3. “What If” Scenarios

Key #1: Business Insights

Business insights are one of customer relationships’ biggest building blocks. Diving into this element of your CX program empowers your team to better understand the relationship between retention, loyalty, and profitability. Once you’ve got that intel handy, your program’s ties to overall business wins and drivers become clear as day! Such drivers might include how customer experience relates to loyalty, how business ops are affecting retention, and the financial impact that comes with Experience Improvement. That last one is especially important for proving ROI and making the case for the positive impact your program has on customer relationships!

Key #2: Customer-Specific Details

While on the subject of customers, let’s get into how linkage analysis can cover details unique to the people who keep your brand trucking. Specifically, you want to look at the mechanics of specific transactions and behaviors. How intuitive is your contact center menu? Can customers jump between channels en route to getting a single issue resolved? How effective does your customer service have to be for your organization to maintain its market position, and how far might you rise if that service was improved? Questions like these vary from brand to brand, but knowing the answers makes all the difference.

Key #3: “What If” Scenarios

Our third and final tip for making linkage analysis valuable to your company is integrating it into as many simulations as possible. Organizational success comes from future-proofing your experience, which means knowing about customer preferences and potential obstacles before they even fully form. This foresight is where linkage analysis can be very useful, because brands can use it to envision, say, the revenue that could be gained by shortening the claims process, or the retention boost from a more engaged workforce.

The Next Step

CX programs can get a big boost from applying linkage analysis toward these ends, but how else might linkage analysis boost Experience Improvement? Click here to read our full report on everything linkage analysis can do for your brand, your customer relationships, and your bottom line!

COVID-19 Customer Experience
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New Report: How Brands Have Delivered on COVID-19 Customer Experience

By: The InMoment Team

Over this past pandemic-ridden year, companies have been in a state of constant uncertainty as they’ve tried to deliver positive COVID-19 customer experiences. Businesses were forced to rework themselves into the digital landscape and prioritize customer safety. 

According to CX Standards, our ongoing customer experience study, businesses somehow defied the odds and succeeded in providing a satisfactory customer experience despite the barriers of the pandemic. Looking for proof? It’s in the numbers!

What CX Standards Had to Say About COVID-19 Experiences

COVID-19 Customer Experience

CX Standards tracks thousands of customer interactions with over 300 companies across 17 industries in the United States and found that, in 2020, most industries’ Net Promoter Score (NPS) increased in comparison to 2019, when more experiences were still in person.

The chart above summarizes our findings on how consumers ranked each industry in 2019 and 2020 according to their overall customer experience, which in turn gave us a big-picture look at how satisfied the general public is. For example, if you compare the spring and fall seasons for the technology, utilities, and professional services industries to non-pandemic periods, you can see how median customer satisfaction scores have improved. 

In the spring of 2020, median satisfaction scores were 9% higher than the months leading up to the pandemic. Similarly, the scores for the fall of 2020 increased 4% from the same time in 2019.  

You would think that overall customer satisfaction would have decreased drastically in 2020 because of all the obstacles that come with a virtual world, but instead, customers were generally more satisfied than when the world was “normal.” The question to ask, then, is what can we learn from how the customer experience has evolved during the pandemic?

Three Insights from COVID-19’s Impact on Customer Experience

  1. CX programs are essential to keeping your business afloat
  2. Online experiences make or break a consumer’s opinion of your brand
  3. CX will still hold weight in a post-pandemic world

Insight #1: CX Programs Keep Your Business Afloat

Businesses have had to respond quickly to the changes COVID-19 created: shifting from in-store to digital-only interactions, going to extreme lengths to make sure customers know that their products are sanitary and safe, and taking care of all their employees so they can do their work at home when possible. In order to survive, many brands employed new digital frameworks to continue to sell their products and services. For instance, the restaurant industry experienced one of the highest NPS increases in 2020 by integrating features like QR code menus to enhance outdoor dining experiences or partnering with third-party services for a smoother pick up/delivery.

The idea of so many businesses operating solely online seemed unimaginable just a year ago, but the pandemic forced that to become reality, teaching us that a solid CX program is the first step in successfully adapting to the digital consumer environment. People’s attention spans are shorter online, websites are just not the same as talking to a human being in a store, and customers’ problems can be hard to fix when they’re displayed on a computer screen.

The world will only transform more into a digitalized landscape, which has many advantages but also a fair share of challenges. The challenge for customer experience lies in still supplying the attentive customer service someone should receive in a store when that customer is interacting online.

Insight #2: Online experiences Make or Break a Consumer’s Opinion of Your Brand

It’s no secret that people barely take time to sift through a website—you probably don’t either. The consensus from several studies is that viewers spend less than a minute scrolling before they leave a website, which means that it takes just a few seconds for them to form an opinion. Even if a customer has never spoken to anyone in your company, your website speaks for you and it can easily communicate the wrong ideas.

One of InMoment’s customers had to face this issue when the pandemic hit. This major home goods retailer depended on in-person interactions to make sales, but with customers only being able to browse products online due to restrictions, it needed to circle back. 

With consultation from InMoment customer experience experts, the retailer transformed its website to include new digital listening posts like live chat, which allowed online salespeople to inform customers which products were more suited to their needs, just as they would in store! With these adaptations, the retailer was able to guide the online experience rather than risk customers leaving after having to scroll through endless pages of products.

Another factor to take into account is how brand reputation relies heavily on your online presence, which is not solely made up of your company website. It also consists of your social media posts and advertisements. A customer’s entire opinion of your business can be swayed with just a few clicks, so it’s imperative that your online customer experience be viewed as crucially as the in-person experience.

Insight #3: In a Post-Pandemic World, Customer Expectations Will Not Go Back to Normal

Now that customers are used to the benefits of digital, they might not want to go back to the same customer experiences they had before the pandemic. It’s not so crazy to think that customers will still want kiosk ordering at a restaurant instead of having to talk to the cashier, or to order a pair of shoes online and pick them up in store. After restrictions are lifted, customers will likely prefer a more hybrid approach and expect businesses to continue a strong online presence. 

If the past year has taught us anything, it’s that it’s nearly impossible to predict the future. We may not be able to guarantee the status of customer satisfaction after businesses adapt, but what’s certain is that CX programs need to refine their digital and in-person strategies so companies can thrive moving forward. 

To read more about what we found out in our CX Standards study and how COVID-19 continues to impact the customer experience, check out this report!  

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Digital Experience Strategy: What Drives Your Customers’ Behaviors?

By: The InMoment Team

As customer demands have grown more complex, so too has the idea of what to do about the customer experience (CX), especially when it comes to digital experience strategy. It was never enough to scoreboard-watch numbers and react to situations only as they occurred in real-time; if you want to forge meaningful connections with customers while strengthening your bottom line, you need to constantly be aware of what drives their digital behavior. This is one of the first steps toward Experience Improvement (XI), and it’s something brands need to implement if they want to not only retain customers, but make a difference with them.

The following are three quick methods brands can leverage to learn what drives customers’ online behavior, enabling them to begin or continue a cycle of continuous improvement:

  1. Challenge Your Assumptions
  2. Know Your Drivers
  3. Leverage All Your Data

Method #1: Challenge Your Assumptions

This is an important step to take no matter how well you know your customers. Like we said earlier, CX expectations are changing, which means that it never hurts to reevaluate your brand journey through your customers’ eyes. So, with that goal in mind, create some surveys, interview your customers, and map out your current journey. You might be surprised what you learn!

Once you’ve got your customers’ current expectations in mind, leverage those to get to know your clientele better as people. Being personable is its own reward, but customers will always prefer an organization where everybody knows their name. Besides, better knowing the people who sustain your brand causes employees to become more invested in the mission and vision.

Method #2: Know Your Drivers

It’s always a good idea to take a hard look at your customers’ behaviors; especially the ones that seem to correlate with growth, retention, and finding the moments that matter. When you find those behaviors, you’ve found the things that have the largest impact on both customers’ interactions with your brand and your business as a whole.

Knowing what these behaviors are can provide a ton of intel and context on how to brush up your customer touchpoints, map new segments of your customer journey, and how to reach those individuals for new products and services that you know they’ll love. This ties into the notion of future-proofing, i.e., knowing what your customers may want before they themselves even know, a foresight that will make your brand even more competitive.

Method #3: Leverage All Your Data

Knowing how your customers behave is great, but it’s only half the battle. The final step toward understanding what drives your customers’ digital activities is putting their behavior against a backdrop of other metrics. Financial data, operational information, and other contextual information belong in that backdrop. So too do sources like social, VoC, CRM data, and website/app data.

The Power of a Well-Executed Digital Experience Strategy

Pulling all of this information together can take time, especially if it’s siloed with multiple teams, but if you can pull it off, you’ll have a 360-degree view of your customer that goes beyond ‘just’ digital drivers. This holistic understanding allows your organization to not only build a hyper-accurate profile of your customer, but also unites your entire organization around it, enabling you to create meaningfully improved experiences that bring customers back, create a stronger bottom line, and boost your organization to the top of your vertical.

Looking to add to your digital experience strategy? Our latest eBook lays out four quick wins that will put some points on the board for you customer experience team in the best way possible! Check it out here.

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The Automotive Customer Experience Is Changing. Here’s How Your Brand Should Adapt

By: The InMoment Team

There was a time when the automotive customer experience was fairly straightforward. Customers would shop around for a vehicle, buy one, and then rarely interact with that brand again outside of service stops. However, as customer experiences have grown more complex, so too have their expectations, meaning that a formerly simple set of interactions have grown into their own ecosystem of multiple journeys and touchpoints.

What follows is a set of simple steps that your automotive brand can take to adapt to this changing landscape, enabling you to stay a step ahead of both the competition and your own customers’ expectations (any organization that can anticipate what its customers might want before even they know will be a winner in its vertical).

How to Adapt to the New Automotive Customer Experience

  1. Understanding Customer Frustrations and Delights
  2. Directing Frontline Training Efforts
  3. Predicting Happy and Unhappy Customers
  4. Identifying Moments That Matter

Step #1: Understanding Customer Frustrations and Delights

This tip may seem obvious, but bear with us, because there’s a more productive way of going about understanding customer experience sentiments than waiting to react to a bad Yelp review. Customer experience (CX) orthodoxy tells us that it’s just fine to address problems and delights as they occur in real time, but “fine” doesn’t take your brand to the top. What does is having designed your program around concrete financial goals, listening to the audiences most pertinent to those goals, and then directing investments only toward the areas that matter most to them. Why spend big on a piece of your program if it does nothing to solve CX challenges?

Step #2: Directing Frontline Training Efforts

Once you understand what about your customer experience delights or frustrates your clientele the most, you can have a much easier time deciding how and when to train employees accordingly. This is a huge step toward achieving Experience Improvement (XI) because your training efforts are coming from a proactive, informed place that you’ve established in our first step. Empowering your employees to better address problems will also boost their morale and investment in their work, which correlates directly with happier customers.

Step #3: Predicting Happy and Unhappy Customers

This step takes some time to get to, but like we said earlier, being able to future-proof your customer experience and anticipate what your customers will want or reject is a total game-changer. This knowledge can only be built up after taking time to understand your customers as people and training your employees to respond with that mentality. Of course, reaching this step is not a one-and-done; it takes constant proactivity to future-proof your experience, but your bottom line will be stronger and your clientele will thank you for the work.

Step #4: Identifying the Moments that Matter

Being able to spot the moments that matter in your customer experience is the culmination of everything we’ve talked about so far: gearing your program toward spotting problem areas, training employees to proactively tackle brand shortcomings in their interactions with customers, and gaining an understanding of what customers will want down the road. Identifying the moments that matter is crucial to creating a truly customer-centric culture and building a foundation of powerful human stories to take your brand to the top. After all, the best brand experiences aren’t built on just the best tech or consultation; they’re built on the best and most human connections.

Want to learn more about the evolution of the automotive customer experience and how your experience program can help you get ahead? Check out our latest eBook here!

Aged Care Royal Commission
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Aged Care Royal Commission: The Report Is Out… What’s Next?

By: Kiri Burgess, Senior CX Consultant, Brett Thear, Voice of Customer Lead for UnitingCare Queensland

The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety has delivered its final report, with 148 recommendations for overhauling Australia’s aged care system. Among these, the report calls out the need for a new system underpinned by a new Act, additional government funding, and stronger governance.

These recommendations present a vital opportunity for clients and residents to have their voices heard, but it doesn’t stop there. Customer experience leaders need to leverage this feedback in order to deliver a better quality of care for clients and residents.

Where Should You Start?

If you’re looking to get started, we’ve teamed up with the experts from UnitingCare Queensland to outline the main challenges professionals will face in light of the Aged Care Royal Commission Report, as well as some tactical solutions for improving experiences for clients, residents, and employees. 

The First Step: Zone In On Client and Resident Journeys

The Aged Care Royal Commission has shown that the client and resident journey is anything but simple. In fact, it requires all clients, residents, and their informal carers to navigate My Aged Care and make sense of pretty complex information. 

You need to see your business through the eyes of those who are interacting with you r brand. Without understanding what a client or residents’ end-to-end journey looks like, providers can run into three big problems: falling short of their current clients’ expectations and needs, an increase in employee churn, and difficulty attracting new clients.

In the case of aged care, clients, residents, and their families are interacting with your products, services, and brand experience. The best way to see the world from their point of view is through understanding each of their journeys.

Next Up: Consider the Point of View of Informal Carers

Clients and residents are one moving part in a bigger ecosystem. It’s just as important to understand the journey of the main carer or decision maker (often a family member) who is responsible for the client or resident. 

It is estimated that in Australia in 2020, there were almost 2.8 million informal carers, made up of around 906,000 primary carers, and 1.9 million non-primary carers, many of whom are the primary decision maker around the care their loved one receives.

These informal carers have an enormous influence over the care and wellbeing of aged care clients and residents, and have their own set of unique challenges. They may live close by, may be interstate or overseas, they may have a family of their own to take care of, be full time employed or retired, or may require care of their own. 

Carers can have an immense sense of guilt, stress, and worry when making critical decisions about aged care for their loved ones, particularly residential aged care. By understanding the role these carers play, and the needs they have, aged care providers can better design products and services around the family unit. This means a much more pleasant transition to aged care, and much better ongoing support for everyone.

Aged Care Royal Commission: Where to Next?

Want to learn more? There are three more challenges (and their solutions!) we’ve outlined in our latest paper. Don’t miss out on these insights that will help to navigate the new world and fundamentally change the level of care and support provided. Download the full paper here! 

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You Said, We Did: What Is Operational Transparency & How Can It Lead to Experience Improvement?

By: Rita Balgeman, Senior Research Manager in Customer Success

On this blog, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about the importance of taking action on customer feedback to inspire tangible Experience Improvement (XI). For most programs, this “action” means closing the loop with individual customers while also working to identify and solve systemic problems to improve the overall customer experience. But after closing the inner and outer loop, there are those brands that take even further action with operational transparency.

This additional step communicates to customers the actions a brand has taken to directly improve the customer experience. And for taking this extra step, brands are rewarded with further customer engagement and loyalty. In our article today, I’ll discuss how your brand can take this final step and reap the benefits. Let’s dive in!

What Is Operational Transparency?

“Operational transparency” is a behavioral science concept that refers to a company that purposefully exposes its processes to customers to help them understand the work being done on their behalf.  Think watching employees at Subway build your sandwich, or make your coffee at Starbucks. Another example is seeing a progress bar during a software update that lets you know you’re on item 5 out of 20 updates, just so you know how long it will be before you can work again.  

Research has shown that customers value this glimpse into a company’s process and that being transparent builds engagement, trust, and loyalty. Why? Customers appreciate the work companies do for them.

How Operational Transparency  Improves Your Customer Experience  

Operational transparency can be a two-part process embedded into your customer feedback efforts. First, you can combine your transparency efforts with your immediate “thank you for participating” message after a survey. This can look like providing a short overview of how you as an organization plan to look at the feedback and take action. This message can be sent to both participants and non-participants.

So what does this do for you? It lets you be completely transparent about the process and show how feedback will shape the organization. It’s not necessary to identify the exact actions the organization is going to take based on the feedback. Instead, you could mention previous actions you’ve taken as evidence that you aren’t just making empty promises

Secondly, it is important to communicate the actions you’ve taken after the fact to bring feedback full circle. This communication can piggyback on existing marketing communications, be included in feedback invitations, or be a standalone communication.

The key is to be short and focused on a few specific actions, sharing both the feedback driving it as well as the actual improvement (and maybe even how it’s been received). The idea here is to say to your customer, “you said, we did!”

How Does This Work in Practice?  

We have many clients who successfully communicated their Experience Improvement actions to their customers. Here are just a few of those examples: 

  • One client, a global supply chain company, sent out an email from their COO in early January to all of their customers, thanking them for their business and sharing the results of their survey alongside the improvements the company planned to make.  The company tracked the number of customers who opened the email and found that the vast majority of customers opened the email.
  • One of our superannuation clients builds operational transparency into their ongoing newsletter to fund members and employers. They include in the newsletter an update of any action that has been taken based on their voice of the customer program. 
  • A shipping company has automated their customer communications through our platform. They have an email that explains their action process and also highlights several initiatives they have implemented based on the feedback they’ve received. They update the email regularly to keep it fresh and relevant.
  • A global technology company has created a page on their website which they continuously update to reflect the actions they have taken based on customer feedback. In an annual email, they incorporated a video from the CEO regarding how feedback was used to make changes, including a summary of the items implemented.

In the end, this type of transparency not only engages customers, but it also communicates how much you value their feedback. It is a way to show appreciation for the customer while also building loyalty. And that’s what we like to call a win-win.

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